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Month: April 2017

Here is a very rough draft of what my photobook might potentially look like. As I looked at past variations of photobooks, I found I preferred dark backgrounds. I also found I liked spreads where one side was a single large picture and other side was a collection of photos. This way one picture sums up the theme and the rest continues the trend. I actually took Comm 125 before this class, so my indesign experience is minimal, but I am looking forward to learning more so I can put together a solid photobook later this semester.

Hi, my name is Parker Ogden and I am excited to be a part of the Digital Imaging class this semester, taking it as part of my concentration in visual communication. I honestly have minimal experience with photography and editing photos, usually leaving it to my wife or friends who have more experience. As you will see in my past photos, I don’t usually take pictures for fun, but I am hoping to change that this semester.
The picture above is of my wife Emily and I at a relative’s wedding. We met here in Rexburg over 3 years ago and have been married for 2 years now. For personal hobbies I love board sports, especially snowboarding, and I am a huge nerd/gamer.

None of these photos are edited, and most of them had a specific purpose for being taken, like to show someone or for an assignment. I have a personal aversion to pictures and social media, so I am hoping to motivate myself to see the positives of those things so I can be better at visual communication in the modern world.

Process: For this project I chose to focus on a PS4 controller in my living room. I used my phone for the pictures and decided to only have light coming in through the window as my lighting for the shots. I thought that since it is not a fixed object I should get some shots of it being used as it was intended, being held and turned on with the backlight glowing. I tried to design this project as close to the original parameters from memory as possible since the original project rules have been erased by an error on the home site. I also tried playing around with effects on the Logo for added interest.

Process: I chose to redesign slides for the TED talk “Creative Confidence” by David Kelley, as it was one that I wanted to rewatch and really ponder on. I started by watching the talk and taking notes of major points for potential slide topics. I then went back through my notes and finalized on which points were most important. I picked a keyword/potential picture for each point. After that was done I worked on the actual slide design and decided to go for something simple and undistracting. I went with a gradiated blue background as it felt mellow but didn’t steal from the pictures. And I added green bars to hold the titles and pictures. I also decided to round the edges of the pictures since the hard edges felt distracting to me.

Process: Because of the size of this project, we did some of the busy work, like writing the article and finding images, earlier in the semester. Overall I wanted to keep things simple, like I wanted my color scheme to fit my images, like the yellow of the buildings and the blue of the sky and the suits in my images, while adding purple as a pop of color. I tried to align both images of the BYU-I campus on the opposite sides of the pages for repetition in the corners. For placing the text, I chose to break up the 5 paragraphs between the two pages rather than have one spill over onto the second page. I added the ribbons in the corners to promote the flow of reading from left to right, top to bottom.

Draft Critique: For my draft critique I reached out to Sister Foulk for her advice on what I could improve. She suggested I change the body copy, remove hyphens from the paragraphs, change the purple pastel color to a stronger one and that I remove the outline from the bottom blue half of the page. I went through and did every one of her suggestions, and felt they incredibly improved the whole spread. I especially was appreciative of the suggestion to remove hyphens, since that never occurred to me but made the text look incredibly better!